Review: Palaver An IRC App for iOS

by Jeff Weisbein 12 years ago 3 min read

IRC, otherwise known as Internet Relay Chat, is the grandfather of chat protocols and believe it or not, IRC is still popular today. There are thousands of different IRC networks out there which cater to all different types of people and topics, so it’s really easy to find a group of people who share similar interests as you to chat with. If you are interested in searching through various IRC networks to find one that you like, check out SearchIRC, a site dedicated to indexing and categorizing IRC networks.

Once you find an IRC network you like, you can connect to it using an IRC client. In the past, we’ve featured mIRC for Windows and Textual for OS X, however, today I’m going to share with you my favorite IRC app for iOS. That app is called Palaver. It was designed by a friend of mine, Kyle Fuller and he’s done a really excellent job.

Sporting a sleek user interface, the app is packed with great features such as, the ability to customize highlight and mention notices with alerts and vibrations, SASL support, Support for TLS/SSL, ZNC integration, and the ability to sync your preferences with iCloud.

Another thing I love about Palaver is that it allows for multi-tasking, which means even if you move to another app on your iPhone or iPad, Palaver will remain connected for up-to 10 minutes of not being in the app. This is great for me because I’m often using several apps at once and with Palaver I don’t have to worry about missing any of the conversation.

And as any good IRC client, Palaver has all the basic IRC functionality too. You can easily setup auto-identification, auto-join for channels and networks, manage your channel by OPing, voicing, kicking, or banning people, send private messages to other users, and more.

I spoke to Kyle prior to writing this article and he told me that he is currently in the process of completely re-writing Palaver’s internal code to make it more efficient and use less memory, therefore improving the end-user experience. He also let me know about three new upcoming features: nick auto-complete (so you don’t have to type out someone name in the channel), ZNC push notification support, and an image upload ability so you can easily share images from your iPhone or iPad with the people in the chat room. The newly re-written Palaver as well as the new features will be available in version 1.1.

Palaver is a universal app, which means it works on both the iPhone and the iPad and is available for $2.99 in the App Store. You can find some screenshots below.

Also, if you weren’t aware BestTechie has an IRC chat room which is open to the public, feel free to drop by and say hi. You can find it on irc.freenode.net in #besttechie.